Now we will create our first application with the Spring Framework; we will create a basic structure for the CMS application with Spring Initializr. This page helps to bootstrap our application, it's a kind of guide which allows us to configure the dependencies on Maven or Gradle. We can also choose the language and version of Spring Boot.

The page looks like this:

In the Project Metadata section, we can put the coordinates for Maven projects; there is a group field which refers to the groupId tag, and we have artifacts which refer to the artifactId. This is all for the Maven coordinates.

The dependencies section enables the configuration of the Spring dependencies, the field has the autocomplete feature and helps developers to put in the correct dependency.

Before we run the application, let's have a walk through our project structure. 

Open the project on IntelliJ IDEA using the Import Project or Open options (both are similar), the following page will be displayed:

Then we can open or import the pom.xml file.

The following project structure should be displayed:

Open the pom.xml, we have three dependencies, spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf, spring-boot-starter-web, spring-boot-starter-test, and an interesting plugin, spring-boot-maven-plugin.

These starter dependencies are a shortcut for developers because they provide full dependencies for the module. For instance, on the spring-boot-starter-web, there is web-mvc, jackson-databind, hibernate-validator-web, and some others; these dependencies must be on the classpath to run the web applications, and starters...

Now, we have an application up and running in this section, and we will add some REST endpoints and model some initial classes for the CMS application, the REST endpoints will be useful for the AngularJS integration.

One of the required characteristics for the APIs is the documentation, and a popular tool to help us with these tasks is Swagger. The Spring Framework supports Swagger, and we can do it with a couple of annotations. The project's Spring Fox is the correct tool to do this, and we will take a look at the tool in this chapter.

Let's do this.

Before we start to create our class, we will add the Lombok dependency in our project. It is a fantastic library which provides some...

Now, we have the skeleton for the REST layer ready, and in this section, we will start to create a service layer for our application. We will show how the Dependency Injection works under the hood, learn the stereotype annotations on Spring Framework and also start to think about our persistence storage, which will be presented in the next section.

We need to make some changes to our model, specifically in the News class. In our business rules, we need to keep our information safe, then we need to review all the news. We will add some methods to add a new review done by a user, and also we will add a method to check if the news was reviewed by all mandatory reviewers...

The AngularJS Framework has been becoming a trend for a few years, the community is super active, the project was created by Google.

The main idea of the framework is to help developers handle the complexities of the frontend layer, especially in the HTML part. The HTML markup language is static. It is a great tool to create static documents, but today it is not a requirement for modern web applications. These applications need to be dynamic. The UX teams around the world, work hard to create amazing applications, with different effects, these guys try to keep the applications more comfortable for the users.

AngularJS adds the possibility of extending the HTML with some additional attributes and tags. In this section, we will add some interesting behaviors on the frontend application. Let's do it.

In this chapter, we created our first Spring application. We saw Spring Initializr, the amazing tool that helps developers create the application skeleton.

We looked at how Spring works under the hood and how the framework got configured with a couple of annotations. Now, we have a basic knowledge of the Spring Bootstrap functions, and we can understand the Dependency Injection and component scan features present in the framework.

This knowledge is the basis for the next chapters, and now we are ready to start to work with more advanced features, such as persistence. Here we go. See you in the next chapter.